A week after it came out, the newest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been received very much like the previous ones: Headlines and columns warning of the dire forecasts of the world’s scientists, environmentalists brandishing it as evidence of the need for radical action and a whole bunch of folks wondering how it’s any different than the last dire forecast.

Below, a quick guide to what the world’s top climate scientists are telling us about our gas tanks, our power plants and our future.

IPCC scientists are generally agreed that humans have already driven up the earth’s temperature by about 1 degree Celsius. The gist of this new report is to figure out what the earth would look like at 1.5 degrees, and what would be needed to stop warming from rising even higher. Reaching 1.5 degrees “is not considered ‘safe’” writes the report, but the report pegs it as the level at which humanity could eke through climate change without too much irreparable harm. But getting to 1.5 degrees is quite a tall order: Fossil fuel consumption would essentially need to start plummeting immediately. By 2050, fossil fuels would need to shrink to only one third of global energy usage, with the other two thirds coming from renewables. And even if the world pulls off its Paris Climate Accord pledges, the IPCC isn’t confident it would be enough. “If current pledges for 2030 are achieved but no more, researchers find very few (if any) ways to reduce emissions after 2030 sufficiently quickly to limit warming to 1.5°C,” it reads. Humanity has pulled off seismic shifts in energy use before, such as the leap from whale oil to kerosene, or the jump from horses to automobiles— but this would need to be bigger and faster than anything yet seen. For instance,while we’ve been pretty good at buying electric and hybrid cars in recent years, keeping to the 1.5 degree threshold would require an uptake of electric vehicles that “would be unprecedented and far higher than has been experienced to date.”

The report (like other IPCC reports) isn’t as apocalyptic as you might think

Words like “apocalyptic” have been used to describe the report.Biblical illustrations by Jim Padgett, courtesy of Sweet Publishing via Wikicommons

A lot of the press coverage on the new report has liberally employed terms like “nightmare,” “apocalypse,” or “a world on fire.” The IPCC report contains plenty of dire scenarios of a 2 degree world: Death of the world’s coral reefs, an extra 300 million exposed to crop failures, deadly heat waves becoming an annual occurrence in South Asia. Climate change could undo decades of progress on improving human welfare, but it’s not an existential threat to the species. Even unchecked climate change is not on the scale of a nuclear holocaust; its costs are more akin to a couple world wars and global pandemics. The most dire images come from a section where report authors imagine a world in which humanity has made almost no attempt to curb emissions. By the year 2100 the world “is no longer recognizable, with decreasing life expectancy, reduced outdoor labour productivity, and lower quality of life in many regions because of too frequent heatwaves and other climate extremes.”

The report is also lighter on specifics than you might think

A flooded street that was caused by the combination of the lunar orbit, seasonal high tides and what many believe is the rising sea levels due to climate change on September 29, 2015 in Miami Beach, Florida.Joe Raedle/Getty Images

As has been written before in these pages, it’s prudent to be suspicious if someone blames a specific weather event on climate change. Climate change modelers are confident that a warming world will bring about more extreme weather, but they don’t have a crystal ball to determine whether a forest fire or a drought might have happened anyway. The IPCC aren’t Al Gore; they’re very measured in their forecasts and are not inclined to shoot their mouth off about “moral imperatives” or whatnot. Thus, the report has a lot of lawyerly statements such as this: “Risks associated with sea level rise are higher at 2°C compared to 1.5°C.” Nevertheless, the basic thrust of the science remains: Climate change will impose massive burdens on human civilization, it could irreparably damage earth’s natural systems and it would generally be better to prevent it rather than grapple with the damage.

Why trust the IPCC climate change report?

It is like, instead going to your doctor, having a panel of top doctors from around the world review everything known about your condition, then letting the rest of world's doctors review the initial findings, THEN getting a diagnosis.

One of the persistent problems with these types of reports is that as soon as they’re published, activists wave them around as proof that “the scientists” are telling us to adopt their preferred agenda. “The world’s top scientists just gave rigorous backing to systematically dismantle capitalism as a key requirement to maintaining civilization and a habitable planet,” reads a viral tweet by a self-described Minnesota “ecosocialist.” Fortunately, the IPCC is not advocating the rise of an eco-Stalin. While the report is clear that significant government intervention and even “societal transformation” will be needed to stave off the worst scenarios for climate change, it also places much faith in private investment, innovation and other capitalistic measures. “Limiting global temperature increase to 1.5°C will require a major reallocation of the investment portfolio,” it reads. And in a sentiment that would be unfamiliar to the likes of Mao Zedong, the report warns against pursuing reforms at the expense of making “the poor and disadvantaged worse off.”

The report weirdly pooh-poohs nuclear

In this Friday, June 13, 2014, file photo, a new cooling tower for a nuclear power plant reactor that’s under construction stands near the two operating reactors at Plant Vogtle power plant in Waynesboro, Ga.John Bazemore/AP

Nuclear may generate toxic waste, but it has a great record on emissions. With the exception of hydroelectricity, nuclear is the only way to generate large quantities of reliable base load electricity without burning fossil fuels. Nevertheless, it gets a pretty bad rap in the IPCC report, including that it “can increase the risks of proliferation.” The report even includes the claim that nuclear power plants cause childhood leukaemia, even while admitting that studies “could not confirm any correlation.” There are good, non-hysterical reasons to believe this is a flawed conclusion by the IPCC. Writing in Forbes, pro-nuclear environmentalist Michael Shellenberger accused the IPCC of “unsubstantiated fear-mongering” and ignoring an energy segment that has easily staved off more carbon emissions than renewables.

Finding a way to suck up all the carbon would be nice, but don’t bet the house on it

Environmental activists dressed up as CO2 molecules stage a protest in Berlin on December 12, 2009.DAVID GANNON/AFP/Getty Images

The ideal solution for climate change, of course, would be if Elon Musk magically invents a way to suck all the carbon out of the atmosphere. And there has indeed been major steps made in this sector, be it reforestation, pumping carbon into caves or seeding the ocean to turn it into an ad hoc carbon sponge. The IPCC isn’t averse to what it calls “carbon dioxide removal”; the report devotes many pages to the promises of the existing carbon capture technology and even makes it a key plank of most future scenarios. However, given the newness of the technology, scientists advocate treating it as nothing more than one aspect of a wider climate change strategy. “(Carbon dioxide removal) deployed at scale is unproven and reliance on such technology is a major risk in the ability to limit warming to 1.5°C,” it reads. This is one aspect of the report that you probably won’t hear repeated by jet-setting Hollywood celebrities, who have spent years clearing their high-emitting conscience with “carbon offsets.”

The IPCC isn’t telling you to go vegan

A vegan restaurant in Toronto, August 8, 2018.Tyler Anderson / National Post

You may have also heard that the IPCC is coming to take your bacon and gouda. Once again, this is something being touted more forcefully by activists than the scientists themselves. After the release of the new report, British Green Party MP Caroline Lucas tweeted that it should taken as a call for governments to start “incentivising people to eat less meat and dairy.” To be sure, the IPCC would be the first to argue that a vegan world would be a lower-emission world. “There is increasing agreement that overall emissions from food systems could be reduced by targeting the demand for meat and other livestock products,” reads the report, which also imagines an ideal future in which “societal preference for healthy diets reduces meat consumption and associated GHG emissions.” Not only is it less energy-intensive to grow plants instead of meat, but we would avoid the awesome quantities of methane spewing out of cows every day. Nevertheless, the report stops well short of advocating tofu for all. For one thing, authors write that there is “limited evidence” that policy changes alone could ever expect to spur a widespread shift in dietary choices — and that it would even make a measurable difference. “There is relatively little scientific literature on the effects of dietary shifts and reduction of food wastage on mitigation,” it reads.

The report isn’t calling for a $60/litre carbon tax

Oil pump jacks work in unison, in Williston, N.D.Eric Gay/AP

Several online news outlets picked up on a section of the report that appeared to advocate a $27,000/tonne carbon tax. For context, the current Alberta carbon tax is $30/tonne. At $27,000, gas would cost Canadians roughly $61.50 per litre and this would obviously halt almost all human usage of fossil fuels. But the $27,000/tonne figure is only provided as an example of the most outlandishly extreme case. Even in that scenario, the $27,000 figure wouldn’t kick in until at least 2100 (a year when even Canada’s Conservatives have agreed that fossil fuels will be obsolete). A more realistic figure provided by the report is $135 per tonne by 2030. At about 50 cents per litre, though, it would still make Canadian gas about as expensive as gas in Europe.

Figure from the IPCC report. NPV cost to meet different temperature targets:

In a press release, the IPCC said their report is designed to give governments “the information they need to make decisions that tackle climate change while considering local context and people’s needs.” The report is able to cite some estimates of how much climate change could cost. If warming is kept to 1.5 degrees instead of 2 degrees, for instance, it could stave off $38.5 trillion in damages over the course of the 21st century (for context, this is roughly two years’ worth of U.S. GDP). But one thing that the IPCC report can’t do — and doesn’t purport to do — is provide a cost benefit analysis of where we should best put our time and resources. This isn’t for lack of trying; it’s just that the variables are so massive — and the impacts so widespread — that no scientist could responsibly deliver an accurate dollar figure. “Standard cost–benefit analyses become difficult to justify … and are not used as an assessment tool in this report,” it reads. IPCC also doesn’t have enough data to estimate what the costs of mitigation can do to GDP and welfare. And therein is one of the key hitches in ongoing debates about climate policy: Rising climate change and ditching fossil fuels both carry costs, and arguments will continue about which should take priority over the other. The same day as the IPCC report came out, American economist William Nordhaus was awarded a Nobel Prize for his work in drawing up economic models that balance the costs of climate change mitigation against the costs of cleaning up the subsequent mess. As Nordhaus wrote in 2012, “yes, there are many uncertainties. That does not imply that action should be delayed.”

Laureate William Nordhaus’ research shows that the most efficient remedy for problems caused by greenhouse gas emissions is a global scheme of carbon taxes uniformly imposed on all countries. The diagram shows CO2 emissions for four climate policies according to his simulations. pic.twitter.com/tmxUE6MiLn